Sean Carroll’s ‘The Making of the Fittest<\/a>‘ shows up in a number of reference lists for thinkBio; the reason is that he’s put together a wonderful compendium of topics that can make for a compelling Introductory Biology experience. They’re basically molecules whose evolutionary history and roles are interesting and well-understood. The book packages them into interesting units, and also provides a wealth of resources for an instructor wishing to make sure he\/she has a sound background in the material being taught.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Topics from the book that I’ve found useful (and that appear as thinkBio exercises) include the \u00a0sickle cell anemia vs. malaria, several fascinating opsin<\/a> stories (loss and regain of 3rd human color receptor; adaptation of mammals to blue wavelengths in deep water; birds and UV vision), the comings and goings of pigmentation via the MC1R gene, and the anti-cancer drug Gleevec (as of 1-23-2015, this is part of a Molecular Medicine module that isn’t posted).<\/p>\n

The above is just the subset of The Making of the Fittest that overlaps with content on this website; there are tons of other interesting stories, all targeted at revealing the molecular evidence for evolution and written in such a way as to be accessible to the thoughtful layperson. I have found it to be both an enjoyable read as well as an educational resource, both for my own learning and for assembling teaching modules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean Carroll’s ‘The Making of the Fittest‘ shows up in a number of reference lists for thinkBio; the reason is that he’s put together a wonderful compendium of topics that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}